Unauthorized access to documents and files are damaging to organizations and may cause significant corporate risks of varying forms, such as brand risk, corporate trade secret disclosure risk, financial risk, legal compliance risk, and operational and productivity risk. In today's world most enterprises carry out their business in a collaborative environment wherein data is shared between multiple users, either within or outside the organization, at different geographical regions. For example, within the organization business proposals, corporate presentations, market research and prediction data, and so on may be shared between various stakeholders who may be located at different offices situated at different geographical regions. Similarly data may be shared between different organizations, for example, between service providers and clients. Most of the information in this data may be confidential to the organizations. Thus, organizations attempt to devise various techniques to mitigate the risk that the sensitive or confidential data contained in the data may be compromised.
Generally organizations use various encryption techniques to encrypt sensitive data to prevent unauthorized access. In addition to encryption, access to sensitive data may also be controlled through the use of access control lists (ACLs) wherein the ACLs specifies which users have access to the sensitive data and the level of access or permissions, such as read, write, delete and print, that users have to the sensitive data.